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James Levine Live and On-Screen

ELLSWORTH, Maine — Here’s hoping that James Levine slept well on Saturday night. He must surely have needed it.

C.J. Gunther for The New York TimesJames Levine

Saturday was the big day when Mr. Levine, 67, was scheduled to conduct two blockbusters in two cities — Wagner’s “Rheingold” at the Metropolitan Opera in the afternoon (a performance broadcast live in movie theaters) and Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at the Boston Symphony in the evening — and all this less than two weeks after his delayed return to conducting following spinal surgery in April. A spokeswoman for the Boston Symphony reported in an e-mail message late Saturday night that “all went smoothly” and that the Mahler performance ended around 9:40 and “was followed by an immediate and intense standing ovation that lasted several minutes.”

So Mr. Levine, who said all along that this scheduling held no terrors for him, triumphantly silenced doubts that he could pull off such a feat in his present health. But he has probably not silenced many doubts about the wisdom of having tried it.

Mr. Levine was last seen in these parts of New England around 4 p.m., via the live HD movie-theater broadcast at the Grand in this city midway between Bangor, inland, and Bar Harbor, on the coast. During curtain calls for “Rheingold,” in the new production by Robert Lepage, the maestro looked frail and shaky, as he had after the other two performances I saw (from Times Square and in the Metropolitan Opera House), though he did mount the highish stage platform again, with considerable help from the indomitable mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, who sang Fricka. (At the third performance, on Monday, Mr. Levine stopped short of the platform and acknowledged the applause from the corner of the stage.)

There was doubt for a time whether we here in the theater would actually see Mr. Levine’s curtain call. The satellite feed was evidently plagued by unusual activity on the sun. The transmission stuttered during the opening features, then ground to a halt, leaving the screen complaining of “no signal.”

We were repeatedly assured that the problem was not here but in New York and that the performance would be delayed as a result and shown complete. (Good news for us; potentially bad news for the Boston Symphony.) The picture came back, further along in the introduction, with the soprano Deborah Voigt, who in April is to play Brünnhilde in “Die Walküre,” the next installment of the Lepage production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, now interviewing Bryn Terfel, who plays Wotan in both operas.

The performance began, and ran mostly without incident, an occasional video or audio hitch aside. Then, with major disruptions in the curtain calls, the transmission staggered to a close.

The Met, which had a lot of explaining to do after the premiere of the production, when Valhalla failed to materialize in Mr. Lepage’s ultrahigh-tech production, now had another technological glitch to account for. “The start time of today’s performance of ‘Das Rheingold’ was delayed for a few minutes due to an extraordinary occurrence of sun interference,” a Met spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail message, “which might potentially have interfered with the satellite transmission of the Live in HD show in movie theaters in the Midwest and on the East Coast.”

Whatever. The audience here, 450 at a guess, was patient through it all. Then it joined the Met patrons in greeting Mr. Levine as he took the podium, and was quietly attentive throughout. It shared in the applause for all the performers during the halting curtain calls but did not add to the distant boos for Richard Croft’s portrayal of Loge.

More than one listener commented afterward that various aspects of the production might have made more sense in the opera house. Yes and no. After three viewings in and out of the house, those inelegant belly-slide entrances by the gods still mystify me.